Firewatch (XBox One, 4/26)- Thanks, XBox GamePass! An entertaining, if a tad too slight, first person narrative adventure carried by the always reliable Rich Sommer, who for once is playing a character basically sympathetic and not a secret douche. The opening mini-text adventure about the main character's wife's early onset alzheimers is one of the most depressing sequences I've ever played in a game. I found the easygoing pace quite interesting and the anticlimactic nature of the narrative didn't bother me nearly as much as I thought it would. It just feels like more could have and should have been done here. Like maybe more story, more characters in this sparely populated forest. But then again, maybe the game would have been criticized for being too long.
Life is Strange: True Colors (XBox One, 4/30)- While I wasn't a fan of the original
life is Strange or
The Adventures of Captain Spirit (Or pretty much any Don't Nod game I've ever played), I did enjoy
Before the Storm, which was made by
True Colors' developer Deck Nine. Sure, it was overly melodramatic but not half as manipulative and clunky plotted as the original games (and I actually prefer Rhianna DeVries to Ashly Burch, don't tell anyone). Okay, that DLC was terrible, I'll give you that.
True Colors, like
Before the Storm, feels stronger in its world building and a sense of place than the base games. I think it's perhaps because While Haven Springs is just one random street with a bunch of shops as opposed to a series of locations, I got to know it better. And some of the people better (the subplot about the woman who runs a flower shop dealing with memory loss and her daughter's departure for college is heartbreaking). The game doesn't offer me as much freedom as I'd like to just walk around and listen to random conversations, but the fact that it did made me like it a lot more.
The main narrative is... well, there's a Dartigan video that sums up the plot holes pretty well, it's shockingly badly plotted, which characters behaving in ways that don't make any sense because the plot needs them to behave that way. At the same time, there are plenty of quite character moments that are very compelling. Alex herself, as performed by Erika Mori, is a very relatable character, and the game creates her mental illness issues with fairness. Empathy as a superpower is dicey, but at least it isn't treated as a deus ex machina (well, almost). The game's facial animations are skillfully done- I Keep coming back to the opening scene where Alex is looking right at the player, where her Doctor is off screen discussing with her the terms of her release from what looks like a group home.
That overall plot though, see if you can track this:
- Spoiler: show
- before the events of the game, Alex and her brother, Gabe, were abandoned by their father, when, in the throws of emotional turmoil after his wife and their mother's death from cancer, he hits a young Alex. He doesn't ask a relative for help, he doesn't call anyone, he just mutters "Someone from child protective services will come along" and then gets his jacket and leaves. While it seems he has had zero contact with them, and hasn't even been sending them money, Gabe nevertheless has been searching for his father while Alex was institutionalized. Gabe tracks his father's last whereabouts to Haven Springs, where unbeknownst to him, his father died in a mining accident and Jed, Typhon's foreman at the time, covered it up. Now, when a kid who looks like one of the guys who died in the accident shows up in town looking for him you'd think Jed would do anything to make him leave but no he gets him a job in the bar and an apartment above it. The argument can be made that he did this out of guilt, but considering the lengths he's willing to go to cover all this up, I don't buy it. Also Jed tries to get rid of Alex by shooting her in the head so she'll fall into the mineshaft and doesn't check to see if she survived that fall or not. Given Alex's past, wouldn't it made more sense to fake a suicide? Also, Typhon settles with Gabe's girlfriend Charlotte, who has no legal right to anything regarding his death, and yet doesn't try nearly as hard to settle with Alex, his only living relative? And while I love the tempting offer to either stay in Haven Springs or go off on your own with your love interest, why the hell would Alex be welcome in Haven Springs when she inadvertently destroyed the company that employs nearly the entire town?
Whew, now that that's over, and boy I need to get a life, I did overall like the game, I think some of the basic ideas and writing could be implemented better. The saddest thing of all, though, is that small places like Haven Springs just don't exist anymore in the America of 2022, and haven't for a very, very long time.
--Dan
